Please, God, don’t let us die here.
She thought of her mom and dad and determination welled inside her. Hell no, they weren’t going to die. They would get through this. Whatever the bastard who’d taken them wanted, they would do it until they figured out a way to escape.
Come on, Uncle Tony, find us!
Tiffany had no idea who had taken them. She’d gone to the bar but she’d had to leave early. She felt sick. By the time she got to her Jeep she couldn’t keep her eyes open. The last thing she remembered was her vision fading to nothing.
A human trafficker had probably taken them. They were young. Those sick pieces of shit liked to find young women. Her uncle had warned her to be careful for that very reason.
Or maybe it was a serial killer.
Uncle Tony knew all about serial killers, too. He would find them.
19
Antebellum Inn
9:00 p.m.
Jo paced the sidewalk along McIntosh Street. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in ten years. There was no way to describe how badly she’d needed one or how good it felt to draw the smoke into her lungs right now.
She’d coughed and choked a couple of times on the first one, but the second one was going far more smoothly.
LeDoux sat on the back steps of the inn watching her. He was determined to keep an eye on her. She wanted to leave and he was having no part of it. It wasn’t that she had some luxurious hotel room of her own. She didn’t. Her Celica had been her room on wheels until she’d ended up here with him. This was what she’d wanted—wasn’t it? To hook up with someone involved in the investigation, determine if she could trust that someone, and then spill her guts.
And she’d hit pay dirt. Not only had she latched onto a federal agent—okay, a former one—but also he was the uncle of one of the victims. He had the cop smarts and the emotional involvement. Was that not everything she could have hoped for and more? If she was completely honest with herself, she would admit that at some point over the past twelve or so hours she had decided she could trust him. It was all good, right? Serendipity or whatever?
Yet they were getting nowhere.
And LeDoux grew more suspicious of her by the hour. She might have spent the past eighteen years avoiding other humans but she could still read them pretty damned well.
The only good thing that had happened was Conway getting his. She paused, closed her eyes and drew deeply on the cigarette. She smiled as she released the smoke. Oh yes. The bastard had gotten his. Bled out like a stuck pig. Whoever killed him—still felt like LeDoux thought it was her—she had done it right. In the chest, probably got the heart or close anyway. And the gut. Oh yeah, he’d felt that one before he sucked in his last breath.
The problem was, with him dead she couldn’t exactly interrogate him the way she’d planned. Jo had imagined all sorts of ways to torture him to extract the information she needed. Now that wouldn’t happen.
Maybe Madelyn had killed him. She may have figured out who Jo was, the same as Jo had recognized her. Was she tying up loose ends for the man in charge? Maybe the blonde who’d dyed her hair red eighteen years ago was the man in charge.
Jo stopped her pacing for a minute. Chain-smoking those two cigarettes had given her a buzz. Damn. She stared up at the moon through the massive trees shading the street. When she’d reached college she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Cancer sticks were for idiots. That had been her opinion. But the minute she was released from the hospital all those years ago, she had made her brother stop at a convenience store and buy her cigarettes. He’d argued, but he’d felt so sorry for her he hadn’t been able to refuse her request.
She’d smoked for almost eight years. Smoked, drank and tried about a dozen other ways to erase the memories from her brain. None of it had worked.
Not one fucking thing she tried. So many times she’d wished she had died in that damned box. She and Ellen would both have been better off. Ellen would never have had kids and a husband to leave so devastated. All the others, too. Half the ones who’d survived had committed suicide within five years of being found.
Jo had only considered checking out two or three hundred times.
Finally, one day she’d decided the whole broken and grieving process was too fucking complicated and time consuming. She’d made up her mind to put the past behind her and never look back. Maybe she could have succeeded if Ellen had killed herself back then. But that didn’t happen. Ellen had continued to intrude into her life whenever she found herself too close to the edge. She would cry and whine and plead and Jo would listen, occasionally make a sympathetic comment and feel a little guiltier about what happened.
Now Ellen was dead and Jo was back in this damned place.
The definition of insanity, of stupidity or maybe both.
Jo threw the cigarette butt into the drain and shoved the lighter and pack into her back pocket. Reclaiming a bad habit wasn’t going to get her through this. Neither was all the alcohol she wanted so desperately to consume right now.
Conway was out of the way but Houser—Martin, she called herself now—was still out there. Obviously their partnership or whatever the hell it was had still been operational. Was Houser the one who ran the show or did she report to whoever orchestrated whatever the hell this was?
Apparently, they had changed their MO or extended their hunting ground out of the Southeast. There had to be a reason why no similar abductions occurred for all those years before Tiffany and Vickie were taken. And by God, Jo had searched for them. Not a single day passed without her scanning news feeds and other sites a good reporter learned to search. She hadn’t found even one set of abductions that matched the MO of the ones like hers in the past thirteen years—until she came back to Milledgeville two days ago.
What had suddenly changed? For one reason or another, he or she or them had gone back into business. If they had merely changed their MO so completely during the past thirteen years that she couldn’t spot it in her searching, why the sudden about-face?
The concept was unreasonable, illogical.
LeDoux was on his phone now. She couldn’t hear enough of what he was saying to gauge who might be on the other end.
She’d answered all his questions. She’d told him everything—well, almost everything. She hadn’t told him the one thing she had promised Ellen she would never tell anyone. And she hadn’t gone into the explicit details on any of it. Only the basics. They had discussed various motives for the abductions. Potential perpetrators—unsubs or unknown subjects, he called them.
They both agreed the motive was likely one of two things: behavioral trials of some sort that involved drugs—though she couldn’t say for sure they had been drugged other than for purposes of sleep—or maybe for sick gladiator-type games involving nudity and violence for the purposes of selling on the deep web.
She’d read plenty of articles about the bizarre things people did for money. The internet was loaded with people who wanted to watch violent sex, violence period. There were even people who would pay another person to do bad things to them. Seriously bad things. There were those who bought body parts to eat. Others who sold body parts on the black market.
The world was a sick, sick place with some seriously demented people hidden behind their masks of normalcy.
Like Miles Conway.
“Bastard.”
She turned to the man still watching her. With only a couple of streetlamps and the ambient lighting around the inn she couldn’t really tell what was on his mind but she felt confident there was about to be a battle. He was a former FBI agent—a big-time profiler. LeDoux would be accustomed to doing things his way.